The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)

by Hilary Mantel

‘Io non trovo arma forte Che vetar possa morte…’ What weapon is strong enough, to shield me from death?

Prophets—and we are awash with them, though their better forecasts are made after the event—

‘Listen, son, this is what I know: right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for.

There is a time to be silent. There is a time to talk for your life.

you add him up, does the total make a man? He is made of shards and broken fragments of the past, of prophecies and of the dreams of his ancestral line. The tides of history break inside him, their current threatens to carry him away. His blood is not his own, but ancient blood. His dreams are not his own, but the dreams of all England: the dark forest, deserted heath; the stir in the leaves,

Your enemies will continually belie you, and fix you with the blame for the malfeasance of others or for simple misfortune. Save your breath: any exculpation is too late. Do not be weakened by regret, and do not let regret weaken the king. Sometimes a king must act on imperfect information, and afterwards sanctify his impulses.

Do not be afraid to ask for what you want. Ask and it shall be granted: but first cost it out. The king wishes to appear magnanimous at the least expense to himself. This is a reasonable position for a ruler to adopt.

This year has been what every year is: one long royal day, from the king’s first stirring to his slumber. Yet it has drawn to one singular moment, as glass concentrates the rays of the sun.

Do not turn your back on the king. This is not just a matter of protocol.

When you become a great man, you meet kinsfolk you never knew you had. Strangers turn up at your door claiming to know more about you than you know yourself.

men become dust, but the realm is continued.’

I prefer the common history, he thinks: in my own life and times, certain themes must be elided.

In his experience, secrets do not keep. Perhaps that flat watery country is less leaky than this.

People are always prompting you, you notice, to forgive and forget. They are always urging you, do as your father did, boy: be what your father was. Young men claim they want change, they want freedom, but the truth is, freedom just confuses them and change makes them quake. Set them on the open road with a purse and a fair wind, and before they’ve gone a mile they are crying for a master: they must be indentured, they must be in bond, they must have someone to obey.

The crippled man walks, but only twice around the churchyard before he collapses in a flailing of limbs. The blind man sees, but the faces he knew in his young days are altered; and when he asks for a mirror, he doesn’t recognise himself at all.

Somewhere—or Nowhere, perhaps—there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

The rich man can slaughter as he pleases, if his pocket can bear the fines, but the poor man cannot afford one murder across his lifetime.

Before God and the law, all men are equal.

It takes a generation, he says, to reconcile heads and hearts. Englishmen of every shire are wedded to what their nurses told them. They do not like to think too hard, or disturb the plan of the world that exists inside their heads, and they will not accept change unless it puts them in better ease.

‘I will draw him with gown well-parted, so the world can see the wonder. A generous wad of quilting.’

‘don’t ask questions unless you know what to do with the answers.’

no, none of us can stand anything. Scrape our skin, and beneath it there is an infant, howling.

Perhaps he must die, and he knows that; but some deaths can be faced and some not. What is it worth, to be spared castration, and the apprehension of it? You could offer him the shock of the axe, the carpet of blood, not the panic of half-hanging and the agony of the knife in the bowel. It is all about anticipation, he tells Call-Me. Give him something to live for, or offer him a death that spares him shame.

Tyburn waits for them, in season: no rush. The summer will clean up the winter’s spoilage.

These Seymours, he thinks, they are like something from the Greek legends.

Never was a lass so augmented; and no bruises either. Bess Seymour will recognise Danaë, and no doubt give her a nod.

He thinks, do not falter, Master Secretary. Have no qualms, my lord Privy Seal; Baron Cromwell, do not fail. You must not soften now.

‘Women are the beginning of all mistakes. Read any of the divines, and they will tell you.’

‘Armed like a man,’ Richard says, ‘yet talks like a three-year-old.’

It is not a servant you have injured, it is the king’s peace.’

You do everything. You have everything. You are everything. So I beg you, grant me an inch of your broad earth, Father, and leave my wife to me.’

‘It goes into the big box of secrets, where an ogre squats on the lid.’

The king is like the shrike or butcher bird, who sings in imitation of a harmless seed-eater to lure his prey, then impales it on a thorn and digests it at his leisure.

Why does the future feel so much like the past, the uncanny clammy touch of it, the rustle of bridal sheet or shroud, the crackle of fire in a shuttered room? Like breath misting glass, like the nightingale’s trace on the air, like a wreath of incense, like vapour, like water, like scampering feet and laughter in the dark

All these holy kings gone to their rest: time is battering their works like siege engines, and when you descend a step you are walking on another layer of the past.

What is a woman’s life? Do not think, because she is not a man, she does not fight. The bedchamber is her tilting ground, where she shows her colours, and her theatre of war is the sealed room where she gives birth.

Whereas we bless an old soldier and give him alms, pitying his blind or limbless state, we do not make heroes of women mangled in the struggle to give birth.

If the king’s child is lost, nothing will persuade him that it is mischance. Kings are subject to fate, not luck. Accidents don’t happen: dooms overtake them.

I am tired of these traditions, he thinks. It is time they were turned out of doors. It is traditional to rob travellers as they come down Shooter’s Hill: is it laudable therefore?

Wriothesley has entered into public duties, where you cannot let your private sorrows show, not even by an increased hauteur with petitioners, or impatience with women and underlings: still less with the Lord Privy Seal.

‘Your reckless tongue,’ he says. ‘I may not always be able to save you.’

Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings.’

The purpose of ghost stories is extortion, generally: to frighten poor folk into paying for prayers and charms to protect them.

Joan the Maid was consumed by flame in 1431. You would think they would find a fresher taunt.

Thomas More used to say that it hardly made a man brave to agree to burn, once he was bound to the stake.

It is against his nature to think that no bargain can be struck. Everybody wants something, if only for the pain to stop.

It was not the first crime he had seen, but it was the first punishment.

Nothing protects you, nothing. In the last ditch, not rank, nor kin. Nothing between you and the fire.

Anything Cromwell does for the king, Sadler and Thomas Wriothesley will be able to do: in time, and between them. He has trained them, encouraged them, written them as versions of himself: Rafe as the plain text, and Mr Wriothesley in cipher.

‘I have warned you, lock up what you write. Prose or verse.’